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Dots

Collection Tunes I wrote

  1. Hell Frozen Over
  2. The Perfect Camping Holiday
  3. The Shooting Star
  4. The Loaf of Bread
  5. Áines Brudpolska
  6. Gills Brudpolska
  7. The Young Queen on the occasion of her Ascent to the Throne
  8. The Thrill of Embarkation
  9. Sonias Brudmarsch
  10. Sylvia

I'm not clever enough to make the MIDI play it properly, but the D.C and FINE markings are supposed to let you know that the last time through the tune you should finish up by playing the first bar again.

I wrote this tune to represent the devil in a theatre piece I was involved in. My idea was to combine a Scandiavian tonality with a Balkan kind of rhythm. It may have come out more as pastiche, but I think it worked pretty well in the play.

Recently I recorded a slightly sketchy version available on a little EP with another tune I wrote around the same time.
The rhythm is inspired by Armenian music, specifically the oud of John Bilezikjian, whose 1994 album Music of the Armenian Diaspora has been a favourite of since its release. The rhythmic pattern goes 3-2-2-3 | 3-2-2-3 | 3-2-2-3 | 3-3-2-2 — Note that the last bar in the pattern is different.

I played it with Tab Hunter on our 1999 album "dolor ipse". You can purchase a download here on my Bandcamp page.
This tune is for my wife, Sam Carroll.
Back in the olden times, I was lucky enough to do a series of schools concerts with Chris Wood and Gail Duff, themed around seasonal food. It was so much fun! Chris was still mostly playing the fiddle in those days, and at one point in the show, he accompanied himself telling a French story, Felix and the Wolf, which prominently features a loaf of bread. At that time I was listening a lot to Chris' friend Jean-François Vrod, and his group Trio Violon, and they played one tune in particular which I loved very much, and which I still play, in fact.* I wrote this tune as a response to these two things: in my mind it was supposed to sound like the music of the Massif Central, although Chris thought it sounded more Swedish: no surprise there, really.

*I thought the tune I was inspired by was a Jean-François Vrod composition called Les Miroirs, but I just went and listened to that again so I could include a link to it here, and it turns out to be completely different (though very wonderful) tune. So now I don't know the name of the French tune I was responding to.
I wrote this for the wedding of my dear friends Áine King and Anthony Hodgson in 1997. They're still married, so it obviously worked, right?
I wrote this tune for the wedding of Tab Hunter and Gill Emerson in 2002.

I managed to work around what I thought was a bug in either abcm2ps or abc2midi to do with first and second time bars in harmony parts. Turns out I needed to add %%score M|H at the top of the tune (where I'd labelled the voices "M" and "H").
I wrote this tune for my daughter Joy about the time when I started to think — ah, yes, she's who she is, my work is done. I was much under the influence of a certain kind of Irish music at the time, and this is a slow jig in that style: perhaps not terribly well-suited to her sunny personality, but there's a relentlessness about it that matches her indomitable spirit, perhaps.
I wrote this in 2020 to celebrate the birth of my first granddaughter, Andie. Obviously: babies love 7/8, don't they? Seriously though, as time signatures go, 7/8 divided 2-2-3 has got so much forward momentum, I pictured Andie sort of half toppling over herself as she ran down the gangplank into life. And yes, I know that's disembarkation. Stop being so pedantic.

To continue the theme of sevens, each part has seven bars: three bars repeated then a seventh bar to round it off. If you strip away the variations and frills, the underlying melody is very simple.

Hear me playing the tune on my Bandcamp page, mostly on mandolins and viola, I think.
I wrote this for the wedding of my cousin Sonia to her husband Joe in November, 2023.
In honour of my second granddaughter, Sylvia, who was born in 2023. It took far too long to appear: I think I scared it away a bit, and all my ideas were either too lugubrious or artificial, or both, until this melody found its way undaunted into my mind.

The rhythm is inspired by the German tune Unser Oide Kath, but the feel is much more old-timey, and less abrupt. I hope that in performance it might not be immediately obvious that it's in an odd time signature.

© 1992 Ben Paley

© 1992 Ben Paley

© 1992 Ben Paley

©1995 Ben Paley

©1997 Ben Paley

© 2002 Ben Paley

© 2010 Ben Paley

© 2020 Ben Paley

© 2023 Ben Paley

© 2025 Ben Paley

Generating the image

Generating the image

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Recordings:

  • Ben Paley, "Hell Frozen Over", 2022

Recordings:

  • Ben Paley and Tab Hunter, "dolor ipse", 1999

Recordings:

  • The Wild Turkey Brothers, "Like This Only Better", 1992
  • Bing Lyle and Ben Paley, "We Are Melting", 1995
  • Ben Paley and Tab Hunter, "dolor ipse", 1999

Recordings:

  • Tom & Ben Paley, "Svenska Låtar", 1999

Recordings:

  • Ben Paley, "Notes from the Skirting Board", 2020

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